Philip Hodgetts’ unique blend of business and production knowledge gives him insight into the current state of the industry, and a remarkably accurate look forward. Here he shares his thinking, and points to articles of interest from other sites, with context as to why they're interesting.

Joss Whedon shared an eye-opening fact during Saturday night’s reunion of the “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” team: He’s made more money from his independently financed 2008 Internet musical than he did from writing and directing Marvel’s first blockbuster “Avengers” movie.

That’s pretty amazing considering he would have picked up between $5 and $10 million for writing and directing that first Avenger’s movie.

I previously wrote of Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog in February 2009, where I discussed where the income was coming from. The iTunes revenue and DVD sales must have been pretty good as streaming served more as promotion for the iTunes and DVD sales.

An article in Forbes this week asserts that Netflix’s eventual world-wide reach will prevent funding via pre-sales through traditional territory-by-territory strategy. While a shift is this necessarily a bad thing?

Indeed, Netflix will likely expand from creating original series to creating its own large budget films, with the initial premiere on-line. Netflix may be a vibrant, important source of new financing that disrupts the studio system and bypasses standard distribution channels.

The illegal downloading of films has little effect on box office revenue, and industry estimates of its losses are exaggerated, a study has found.

However, the analysis also found that the national broadband network would encourage digital piracy.

We are still waiting for a peer reviewed study that shows any harm. Waiting, waiting, waiting. (Yes the MPAA/RIAA publish “results” but when you examine the details, their is no support for the MPAA/RIAA position. In other words they publish completely bogus results.)

HBO programming president Michael Lombardo has just announced that not only is the huge piracy [of Game of Thrones] a compliment, but the phenomenon hasn’t hurt DVD sales at all. A couple of months earlier the show’s director, David Petrarca, said that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. Petrarca explains that the show needs “cultural buzz” to thrive and survive, and this buzz is being generated in part by pirates.

While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage. Since the start of the “Promo Bay” initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..

Conventional wisdom is that there is no value in “free” distribution, yet 10,000 artists – probably more than signed to all labels combined currently – have taken advantage of the offer: free music for promotion.

Television as we know it is not going away any time soon, but it is going to be disrupted at some time: all industries are.

But even the largest industries enter periods of transformation — think of once-dominant railroads, wired phone lines, the postal service. The fact of the matter is that periodically, technologies or business model innovations allow start-ups to enter industries offering services that are generally cheaper and more accessible, but of far lower quality. Initially, these innovations are adopted only by the least demanding industry consumers or those who couldn’t afford to participate in existing markets (like the college students who use Reddit to find entertaining Youtube videos instead of paying for HBO). However, over time, these start-ups tend to invest in performance improvements in such a way that allows them to displace industry incumbents (the professionals who are cutting the proverbial cord in favor of Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant Video). This is the essence of what we call “disruptive innovation.” It’s transformed a number of industries and is starting to do the same in the world of television.

Read how Maxwell Wessell cut the cord and transformed his Television viewing.